Full metadata
Title
The African American apocalyptic as prophetic social protest
Description
This study provides a rhetorical analysis of how Black nationalist protest rhetors have employed apocalyptic discourse in order to call into question the ideological underpinnings of the hegemonic white American nation building project and to imagine new alternatives to replace them. Previous studies by Howard-Pitney (2005), Harrell (2011), and Murphy (2009) have explored how African American abolitionist and civil rights jeremiahs such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. have employed appeals to American civil religion in order to mobilize their audiences to seek liberal reforms to racial injustices by appealing to established values and institutions. While apocalyptic rhetoric also constructs its audience as a chosen people, it tends to take a much more skeptical stance toward the established social order. African American apocalypticists such as David Walker, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party rejected the notion of American chosenness that underpins much Black and white American jeremiadic speech, and employed a Burkean perspective by incongruity in order to draw attention to the inaccuracy of white supremacist and American exceptionalist representations of the social world. The end result of this history is the nation's imminent destruction, which has been envisioned as a divine intervention in the case of traditional sacred apocalyptics, such as David Walker or the early Malcolm X, or as a revolutionary uprising of the oppressed, as in the secular apocalyptics of the later Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. African American apocalyptic rhetoric is prophetic in that it invokes a vision of the national past, present, and future defined by a set of values that are at odds with those of the established social order. African American apocalypticism invites its audience to disidentify themselves from hegemonic white American formulations of Black and white identities and to identify themselves instead with radical alternatives. To the extent that an audience is persuaded by apocalyptic narratives of the American nation, new possibilities for action become available to their consciousness, typically involving either withdrawal from a corrupt society or militant resistance involving measures more radical than the nonviolent direct action and moral suasion advocated by liberal African American jeremiahs.
Date Created
2016
Contributors
- Estabrooks, Samuel (Author)
- Miller, Keith (Thesis advisor)
- Ore, Ersula (Committee member)
- Anokye, Duku (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
iv, 137 pages
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.40363
Statement of Responsibility
by Samuel Estabrooks
Description Source
Viewed on December 16, 2016
Level of coding
full
Note
thesis
Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2016
bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 134-137)
Field of study: English
System Created
- 2016-10-12 02:23:26
System Modified
- 2021-08-30 01:20:59
- 3 years 3 months ago
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